Mr Bull, LawBot’s founder and managing director, who is German and speaks six languages, wrote the software.

So just to slow up for a moment there, we’ve got:
1. A law student
2. who’s MD of a company
3. called LawBot4. is German (could be tough, with Brexit…)
5. writes code (as well as essays, one presumes)
6. speakssix languages (only six – what’s he doing in his spare time)

Actually the article goes on to tell us what he did in his spare time. He wrote the app, along with his colleagues. All of which raises serious issues for those of us designing legal curricula…

Like this:

He had been told that when looking for a good oracle it was best to find the oracle
that other oracles went to, but he was shut. There was a sign by the entrance saying,
‘I just don’t know any more. Try next door, but that’s just a suggestion, not formal
oracular advice’.[1]

The Web Summit has just finished, and as expected there’s been no shortage of future-gazing, prediction and reinvention. It was held in Lisbon, a city that, as the Guardian put it, is currently ‘reinventing itself as Europe’s leading tech hub’:

Even if the comparisons with San Francisco are fanciful – and, frankly, extend little beyond the fact that each has a red bridge, hills, trams and good surfing – Lisbon has moved significantly closer to fulfilling its ambitions by winning the race to host this year’s Web Summit.

Back in 2007, in my book Transforming Legal Education, the Afterword winds forward to 2047, and the heroine, Anna, is heading off from her law programme in Glasgow and the virtual town of Ardcalloch at the University of Scotland for a six-month placement in Lisbon, attracted by the improved weather and maybe also the law/tech opportunities. So my prediction of Lisbon as a tech centre was right, but the timing was well out. Of course no one predicted Brexit either, rather a large spanner in the works, for Anna in 2047 and for us now in 2016. Though I remember wondering even when I was writing the Afterword if an independent Scotland might not have better HE possibilities in Europe than hitched to a disUK that wasn’t sure what it wanted in or from Europe. Retrospectively, what a wasted opportunity Indyref1 was, back in 2014, in spite of the economic difficulties it would have caused. They look short-term now, compared to the long-term decline that’s predicted for Brexit Scotland (and that includes the substantial impact on Scots HE).

After Lisbon I predict (‘formal oracular advice’…) Edinburgh will be the next tech centre — the Scottish government has to do something to attract new talent into the Scotland after Brexit. Like San Francisco it’s got trams, hills, bridges (George IV Bridge etc); and the culture of Scottish medieval & Enlightenment architecture must surely influence the code. Surf – yes, well the creatives would have to load up the VW van and head west to the Outer Hebrides, or north, out beyond Orkney, far beyond Shetland, to the truly epic winter Atlantic off the Faroes. The lure of the pre-modern, the fabulous north may grip them as it has me, sparse as code and saga. They may not return.

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Roger Smith, who blogs at Law Technology and Access to Justice, invited me to contribute a post on use of digital legal education & sims – so I sketched out some context to Gina Alexandris’ earlier description a week or so ago on his blog of the use of sims in Ontario’s experimental Legal Practice Program (LPP), and which might be useful for anyone thinking about using sims in legal education. The detail of it sent me back to what we did at Strathclyde a decade and more ago, which doesn’t seem all that bad in retrospect. There’s still some great work going on, both in practice and in research literature — at Strathclyde, where SIMPLE is still in use in the Diploma in Professional Legal Practice, Karen Counsell‘s Torts and Masters programmes at U of South Wales, Wilson Chow & Michael Ing in professional legal education on the PCLL at Hong Kong U, and of course the extensive use of sims in the GDLP at ANU’s Legal Workshop. Detail and references in my post, if you’re interested.

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I’m a Visiting Professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong Faculty of Law, and I spent last week giving seminars and discussing projects with staff — seminars given to first year LLB students, doctoral students, and JD/LLM students; and to staff, on webcasts, podcasts, multimedia and other digital resources. On the last subject, see […]

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Final legal education session.We had a call-off at the last minute, so only two speakers. First up, Melissa Hardy on her research into the third year of a three-year cohort study into the career intentions of law degree students in the context of current and proposed legal education and training reforms She started by describing her […]

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This was the first session on Day 2 of the SLS Conference Legal Education section, a session devoted to the Special Issue on Learning/Technology, The Law Teacher, vol 50 issue 1 [paywall], that was published earlier this year, edited by me. That issue, comprising six papers and discussed on this blog post, was entitled Learning/Technology because I wanted […]

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The second session started with Amanda Zacharopoulou, describing the experience of pre-arrival activities at the University of Ulster Law School She described the process of developing induction activities for students, and particularly pre-arrival activities. Through evaluation they found: the majority of students felt confident to study law; students felt studies advisers were encouraging and supportive; […]

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I was asked to give a plenary talk to the SLS Legal Education section. I invited Dirk Rodenburg, Director of Undergraduate and Professional Programs from Queen’s University Law School, Ontario, to join me to talk about his new simulation platform as part of the presentation, and to talk about his unique blending of medical and […]

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Well, I’ve spent the nine hours or so of this day’s morning here in Glasgow watching Europe beginning to unravel. Desperately sad. Huge implications for Scotland. I voted remain, along with the rest of Scotland, and in 2014 voted yes in indyref but was in the minority then. See this blog post and this article. […]

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I was asked by Pat Leighton to contribute to the LERN workshop today at IALS, ‘Effective dissemination of research findings’, so am focusing on ‘New media and digital research literacies for legal educators’, a session I gave last year and which I’ve updated. Slides as usual at the tab above and at Slideshare. One very […]